Routine water quality services for the Baltic Sea (GMES MarCoast)

The Baltic Sea is subject to various European environmental regulations which aim at securing its long-term protection. This will be achieved by the accompanying monitoring programmes associated with, for example, the HELCOM convention, the EC water framework directive, the natura 2000 Directives and the upcoming European maritime policy, to name the most important regulatory policies. These monitoring programmes demand large scale, frequent and accurate measurements of physical, biological and chemical parameters. GMES (global monitoring for environment and security) is a major activity of the European Union and Commission which aims at providing operational services by making the best use of spaceborne earth observation data, in-situ observations and models. MarCoast is the GMES service element project addressing the marine environment and is funded by the European space agency. MarCoast is providing marine and coastal services for international, regional and national end users. The project is driven solely by these end users, which include mainly public bodies in charge of the marine environment, such as, for example, the European environmental agency (EEA), the European maritime security agency (EMSA) or the German federal and maritime hydrographic agency (BSH). The MarCoast service portfolio includes oil spill detection and polluter identification as well as water quality products and services. The latter comprises monitoring the water quality with respect to European regulations as above, monitoring and alerting of algal blooms and the monitoring of large scale water quality indicators. The production chain of MarCoast begins with ENVISAT MERIS and Aqua MODIS data for the ocean colour products and AATSR data for sea surface temperature. The satellite data are downloaded from the space agencies and routinely processed to provide basic data sets of key parameters on a common grid. A merged MODIS and MERIS data product is produced at 1km. MERIS Full Resolution data (300m) complement the basic data. The service providers combine the basic data with in-situ data, integrate them into forecasting models or perform data analysis and statistical evaluation. Validation plays a key role for the acceptance of the satellite derived products by the end users. The accuracy of the products and the reliability of the service are regularly evaluated by the Validation Bureau, which is an independent entity within the project.